Some Austriaen Insights

I critically discuss recent claims about economic organization in the emerging “knowledge economy,” specifically that authority relations will tend to disappear (or at least become radically transformed), the boundaries of the firm will blur, and coordination mechanisms will be much more malleable than assumed in organizational economics, resulting in various “new organizational forms.” In particular, the price mechanism will be used inside hierarchies to a much greater extent. In order to obtain an analytical focus on the knowledge economy, I assume that it may be approximated by “Hayekian settings” (after Hayek 1945), that is, settings in which knowledge is distributed and where knowledge inputs are relatively more important in production than physical capital inputs. I then argue, drawing on organizational economics as well as Mises’ insights in property rights and comparative systems, that the presence of Hayekian settings does not mean that authority will disappear, etc., although economic organization will in fact be affected by the emergence of the knowledge economy. This suggests that Austrian economics has an important contribution to make to the study of economic organization

On the relations between evolutionary and contractual theories of the firm

It has recently been argued by a number of writers that the evolutionary theory of the firm is a genuine theoretical rival to the contractual theory of the firm. This paper presents a reconstruction of the evolutionary theory of the firm. A taxonomy developed by the Polish philosopher Krajewski is then utilized for the purpose of the discussing the relations between the evolutionary and the contractual theory of the firm. It is possible to argue that the evolutionary and the contractual theories of the firm are rivals. However, it is also possible to argue that they have complementary areas of research, some of which are briefly described in the paper

Austrian economics and the theory of the firm

Like most economists, Austrians have not shown much interest in the theory of the firm. This paper argues, however, that there is much in Austrian economics that dovetails with contemporary theorizing about the firm. Specifically, Austrian economics (in its Hayekian version) is compared to the two dominant approaches to the firm, the contractual and capabilities approaches. Austrian insights in the division of knowledge and the coordination of knowledge as well as insights in entrepreneurship complement this literature. However, it is also possible to develop a distinctly Austrian (coordination) view on firms that differs from both the contractual and the capabilities perspective. Whereas the contractual perspective conceptualizes the firm as nothing but a structure of incentives and property rights and the capabilities perspective conceptualizes the firm as a stock of given knowledge assets, the coordination view tends to see the firm as an entity that organizes a localized discovery procedures in the context of a structure of incomplete contracts and supporting shared mental constructs. In other words, the firm is seen as a cognitive entity